Burn the Field

By Amy Beeder

Cockfights, a prophetic turnip, the "pharmack mysteries" of antidepressants . . . in this book the natural world looms as a potent and nearly conscious metaphor for desire, transcendence and loss. The power in these poems comes from a persistently idiosyncratic combination of subject, language and tone: the dark emotion energy of the subjects--illness, witch trials, lost children--the lush, urgent language, and the exacting, wry, relentlessly unsentimental tone.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887484484
• ISBN13: 9780887484483
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
• Length: 68 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

The Plague Roads

Robert Frost said "All the fun's in how you say a thing." While most poets may not describe the extremely difficult process of crafting powerful, often painful images and ideas out of our rather plain vanilla language 'fun', one feels Ms. Beeder has made the sacrifice and we are the better for her efforts. She reminds us that there can be power in words during an age when all it seems society reacts to is 'some war set fire on a massacre hill' as the poet so beautifully puts it. I believe the highest compliment I can pay to a poet is that their words travel with me. Several passages from Ms. Beeder's have already bored into my overcrowded consciousness and now I look forward to 'traveling the damp side of high roads at dusk."

melancholic, wet & menaced by chairs

The title of this review, from the poem "Fever" serves as an example of some of the precise and beautiful lyric moments in Beeder's book, Burn the Field. without a doubt, this is one of the better books of poetry I've encountered in the past several years. The poems are intricate works of rich image and delicate language and they cover an amazing range of subject matter and tonal qualities. Most striking is Amy Beeder's ability to create complicated symbiotic forms for her work. The variety of structural elements that frame the poem's lush language are invariably useful and appropriate. Enjoy!

If you love the sound and texture of language, you'll adore this book

I have been following Amy Beeder's marvelous work in magazines for years, so what a joy it is to finally have a collection of her poems in hand. She is a poet's poet, one of a very few contemporary writers who is truly a master at her craft, with a skilled ear for meter, an eye for vibrant (and sometimes, disturbing) images and an unusually rich word palate. Her poems are a resonant tapestry of sound. It's a delicious experience to read them aloud. What's more, Beeder's subjects are always striking -- from the arrogant Pasteur to a runaway train "flashing/ like a long black casket" to a dead Haitian girl in a yellow dress "on a heap of street sweepings high/as a pyre, laid on snarled wire and dented rim." This book is wonderful.